We built the Opera Mini server infrastructure based on Pike, starting back in 2004-2005 with a team that initially mostly came from the Roxen/Spinner days (a separate company). I started working there in 97, and I was kinda late to the party - it started out in 93/94.

I still miss working with this language. It just makes so much sense to me.

The way I think of it is as a quite a lot more performant version of Python with a C-like syntax and a much more consistently designed - while still very rich - standard library.

The downside is of course that compared to Python, Pike is now almost completely unknown. The ecosystem is tiny, etc. We really sucked at marketing the language in the early critical days and then after a while kind of gave up and focused on using it to build commercial systems instead.